The Ongoing Inflation Of The Higher Education Bubble

We have been vociferous in our discussion of the looming student loan debt debacle (just as we have been over high frequency trading). With credit creation limited to just student (and auto) loans...

in 2013 just student and car loans alone represented 108% (that's right, more than all) of total household debt created.

We thought the following charts would clear up once and for all just how bad the government's heavy visibl ehand of 'help' has been for the average household in America with childrean aiming to pursue the American Dream...

How much has the average cost of attending college at four-year degree-granting institution in the U.S. risen since the 1969-1970 school year?

For an American student who enrolled in a four-year college in the fall of 1969, the average they paid for their tuition, required fees, room and board totaled $754, which when we adjust for inflation be be in terms of constant 2011 U.S. dollars, works out to be the near modern day equivalent of $4,619.

But a student enrolling in the same kind of institution in the fall of 2011 for the 2011-2012 school year would pay $13,608. Nearly three times as much.

To get a better sense of how affordable, or rather, unaffordable attending college has become, we next calculated the percentage that the average cost of tuition and fees for college would consume of the typical income earned by American households:

In the chart above, we see that after holding basically flat from 1969 through 1982 at a range between 8.6% and 9.0% of the median American household income, the ratio of the cost of attending college with respect to that income began rising rapidly, with the cost of college having reached 26.7% of the American median household income in 2011-2012.

We also see that there would appear to be certain periods where the cost of attending college rose considerably faster than median household incomes, which we've shaded in the chart above.

Let's next look at how the cost of attending college has grown against median household incomes from 1969 through 2012:

Here, we see that there have been three major inflation phases for the cost of college: the first running from 1990 to 1994, the second from 2000 to 2003 and the third from 2007 through at least 2012 (and likely, the present).

We should note that each of these periods coincide with periods of recession or extended underperformance for the U.S. economy. But what is perhaps more remarkable is that we do not observe the same pattern for earlier recessions, the major years for which we've also indicated on this third chart.

That's largely the role of increased government subsidies for higher education after 1989, in the form of grants and guarantees for student loans, which enabled colleges to continue jacking up their prices well above what a typical American household could afford to pay, because now Uncle Sam is increasingly stepping in to pay a growing share of the bill.

When one averages out the numbers, how many students are said to abuse their loans and use the proceeds to fund "other" uses? "About a quarter."

Research suggests a fair chunk of that is going to non-education expenses. In 2011-12, about a quarter of student borrowers took out loans that exceeded their tuition, after grants, by $2,500, according to research by Mark Kantrowitz, a higher-education analyst and publisher of the education site Edvisors.com.

And the one take home paragraph that summarizes this latest capital misallocation clusterfuck which has Fed bailout written all over it:

Mr. Selent, of Fort Lauderdale, knows he is getting himself deeper in a hole but prefers that to the alternative of making minimum wage. In his 20s, he earned a bachelor's degree in communications from a local for-profit school but couldn't find a job in the field after graduating and began falling behind on his student-loan bills. He is now taking courses for a degree in theater so he can become an actor.

What's worse, while the 90+ day student debt delinquency rate did post a tiny decline from 11.8% to 11.5% in Q4, on a total notional basis due to the increase in outstanding balances, as of this moment the amount of heavily delinquent student loans has just hit a fresh record high of $124.3 billion, up from $121.5 billion in the prior quarter.

Let me give you a little context on that, courtesy of personal experience. I am from a divorced family. Mom and Dad split when I was 10. Dad was ordered to pay for my college. (And my brother's and sister's)

One of the most "real" conversations I ever had with my father was when he explained that he was required to pay for 4 years of my college. Not until whenever I happened to graduate. Just 4 years. And just tuition. Not "everything elese" that goes with it. He said to choose wisely and asked me if I understood what he was saying.

I said yes. And I graduated in 4 years, paying for my own room and board, books, incidental expenses, etc. I ran my own landscaping company to pay for that. I cut a LOT of grass. I planted a LOT of plants. I cleaned a LOT of gutters. I wish I could have partied more, but those are the breaks. Villanova was NOT a cheap school. Neither was Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, where my brother became a pilot. He worked his ass off, too, puttng cheap roofs on cheap houses.

Was any of this ideal? No. It was all fucked up, as life usually is. I wouldn't recommend this path to anyone. And this was 20+ years ago, when college was "affordable", in relative terms.

But what I discovered, and what has stuck with me is.... I do my best work with a gun to my head.

If you're waiting for somebody to bail your ass out, if you're waiting for this to be fair, you'll be waiting a long time. I did what I had to do for the times. DO NOT try the same thing today that I did 20+ years ago. Find a different path. Learn to be a welder or do HVAC work or something. College is a racket and one that's got a lousy return if you need to go into significant debt to afford it.

The world isn't what it used to be. It barely made financial sense 20+ years ago. It sure as shit doesn't make sense now. I can't tell you the answer, because it's different today. What I can tell you is that if you follow the traditional path and sink yourself in (non-expungable) debt, you're as good as dead. STAY AWAY FROM DEBT. It is SLAVERY.

But, but, but ... the baby boomers were in the workforce (yes, okay, they're starting to retire now, but they also passed through their peak earning years), GenXers too. Uni costs should have been the lowest relative to the working population. How come prices went UP?

In order to go to uni, you must be smart enough to get in and yet dumb enough to sign a blank cheque and an open contract. It also helps if you don't understand compound interest. What gives first?

Uni: No pay, everything is a loan and an expense out of your pocket.Trade Apprenticeship: Paid to learn, no loans, tools are a tax deduction.

Then Preppy-Pricker University will be making cost cutting measures left and right as their coccaine hook up runs dry.

I throw all almae mater mail straight to the trash. Senior year they mailed out letters asking for soon to be graduates to donate to the "Senior Class Gift" and to donate "whatever they could." I put a penny in the envelope and mailed it back to them.

Sorry Big Guy. You - and most - just don't get it. I have written about this many times. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A STUDENT LOAN BUBBLE. There can only be bubbles in tradable assets, fir which a market is made. There is no market for student loans. (If you want to state that education costs are outrageously high and can't stay there, I would immediately agree.)

Colleges are paid for with printed Fed money. You know....the Fed issues the credit for the student loans. That goes striaght into the economy and is immediately inflationary. Its full effect is felt immediately. The effect you reference is the money which won't be paid back in the future. There is $1 trillion in student debt out there with a default rate of some 11%. So that is $11 billion paid out annually to keep professors' salaries high and employ a bunch of college administrator fools making sure everything is equal at the college. It is just a different form of stimulus - in this case to a bunch of liberal whack jobs who create voters for the Democrats. (See what is going on at Dartmouth - students demanding unisex bathrooms and the like. You tax dollars at work.)

So if the Fed through its "Quantitative Tightening" is providing $20 billion per month - $240 billion per year - less stimulus. Nobody ever expects that back. That money is flushed into bubbleicious stock prices - which can collapse. What is the difference between that and students not paying back their loans. Of course 50%, but the money is flushed anyway. And if the Fed cuts it all back, then college defaults will be in the noise.

The whole issue here is gross misallocation of resources. I gauarantee that if the Fed gives me - or any other ZeroHedge reader - $1 million, there really would be a multiplier in the economy. For staters I would get the wymens studies majors out of the schools and into cutting my grass. After a year, I might start teaching them how to fix my car. Then they could go apprentice for a real auto repair shop. Eventually they would become self sustaining.

The whole higher ed system in the USA needs a drastic overhall. These guys have quite the interesting business model that lowers costs and creates incentive pay. Its all about the teachers. Check them out OPLERNO.com

Fwiw I ran into a guy a few weeks ago who was some sort of consultant to several Universities on their finances. We got into this whole discussion and he said the Universities already know where this is going. I had my 4yr old with me and he said "don't worry about college planning". When I asked him why he said that by the time my daughter is a senior in high school there will be an aptitude exam and whatever level my kid scores will be the level she enters "college". meaning she could start at the sophmore level etc. if she scores well enough.

90% of "College" will be done online. The next several years colleges will cannibalize each other until there are only a handful left that people would be willing to pay to attend. The university system will implode upon itself and many a college campus will be a ghost town as well as the surrounding area that existed solely due to the University. He said there is a huge migration happening to the south right now and the North will feel it the worst, abd first. Again, he said the university's that he consults for have already accepted this and are planning accordingly.

That's only ten years away fonz. We're talking about a radical shift from the current 'competitive' (lol) system - a paradigm change from the false acceptance of university degrees as competence certificates, to certification levels determined by aptitude tests.

It's hard to imagine, but so were a lot of things once, that have manifested into what is today.

Well, obviously the govt can't get out of the loan business, that would be 'draconian'. I see it taking a little longer than that for the average person, or the average parent finally stepping in and saying NO. Kids are indoctrinated every day in public schools that they have to go to college, that's the only way to have a future. And they are told this by public school teachers who probably owe 50k+ in loans themselves. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Too many professors and administrators whose income depends on this scheme to allow this to go away quietly. The gov will probably continue this charade for many years, after all, "it's for the children"

Billy Sol Estes' girlfriend is working on her Phd and has gone non stop from undergrad-grad-phd. She will have about $150k in student loans when she finishes. Her parents are dirt poor and are paying for her sisters hoarding hobby and shitting up the parents' house with her two kids and worthless un-wed baby daddy. Her other sister is a failure in life too. They have only helped her on some medical bills and gas money. Tuition and the rest were all through loans. When we first started dating I was a bit apprehensive to the amount of debt she would have at graduation but I slowly realized she was trying to jettison herself from the shit-hole life her 2 sisters lead where they leech off her parents.

She worked in restaraunts for 10 years, from high school to grad school, and taken out loan after loan every year. I met her at a lower end public school I went to for my masters that literally cannot turn away any student with a cash flow or loan eligibility. The whole masters program was a joke where thesis topics like "what is the probability of catching a foul ball at the Univ. baseball field" were constantly being rejected by graduate affairs.

I originally thought I would ask her to pay a hefty sum of money toward the loans to get them paid off in our lifetime, but at this point I want her to pay the bare minimum and just wait for the SHTF year or mass debt forgiveness. Laissez les bon temps rouler!

I have been watching this space for years now. Without a doubt it is heading into oblivion. A complete mess. Got to run right now - but remind me sometime and I will give a few details about how what the schools are telling people and what they are actually doing are completely opposite! As usual - it's all about the cash!

Very interesting. I have a 6 month old, he is our first child, and I have been thinking about that. My family and my wife's family gave him money for the holidays and his baptism (she and her family are catholic, and consider that a big deal), and have been telling me I should start a savings account for him for college. I take that money and buy silver with it, and put it in my safe in a seperate stack since I refuse to let his purchasing power disappear over the next 18 years. My plan is to either let him use that towards college of he wants, or, when I think he is responsible enough, just give it to him as a start on his savings. I'm not paying 20k a year for him to waste 4 years of his life to earn a useless piece of paper. I did three years there, majoring in kegs and condoms, lost my lottery-funded scholarship (in GA) and enlisted in the coast guard rather than put myself into debt like that. That was almost 10 years ago.

LOL, friend of mine entering the US was queried about his aussie passport as it did not have long to run, the immigration officer was concerned he might try to stay, my friend fell around laughing, pointed out to the officer the free health care he has in aussie, the weather, the lifestyle, the cost of living the 140k plus he earns against the 50k he would earn in the states and asked him why he would possibly want to stay....the officer was not impressed....which made it even funnier.

Not every non peasant in the civilised world wants to live in the US, some of us feel a little sorry for you.

Yawn....haughty comments from some clueless Aussie are entertainment enough but I thought I'd toss some cold water on your little screed. You've just postponed your day of reckoning but when your immense RE Bubble pops and China goes into a tailspin, I doubt you'll be so smug. Aussies have been living WELL beyond their means for a good long time and like the US and Europe, you will soon start circling the drain. And given you are now very close to if not the fattest nation on earth, that -ahem- free health care sure is going to come in handy. Face it, you're a giant strip mine for China and little else and America is their dumping ground. Your pathetic trade deficit is a testament to that and the only reason it narrows is because you're maxing out your credit cards and cannot continue to consume so conspicuously. Otherwise, Australia is a nice place as I've had the pleasure of vacationing there several times. I don't feel sorry for Aussies except to say that the heretofore strange and entirely innacurate depiction of Australian women as blond hair/blue eye surf goddesses couldn't be further from the truth. On the contrary, they're some of the more homely women on earth except for maybe the swamp donkeys native to New Zealand. lol. I guess that's a double whammy, eh mate?

I was in NZ last summer for about a week on business and never did notice even one woman that made my head turn. Granted most of my time was on the south island, but even up in Auckland there was never a hot chick. I had a theory that they had to take whatever they could grab on the docks of England before leaving port.

I was in Rio for Carnaval years ago and a British friend had arranged for us to stay with EIGHT KIWI women in a Copacabana rental house. Long story short, he knew one of them from other travels and so she invited us to stay with the group, mostly because they were scared shitless of Rio. I thought to myself, wow, pretty good odds for a couple of single guys. Surely one of them is relatively attractive. Boy was I in for a major letdown. Every single one of them closely resembled Shrek to some degree. They were fun enough as they could drink like no one's business but that was about it. And when in Brazil, why even bother with anyone other than the stunning local talent. Also traveled around with some cool Kiwi guys in Argentina - they were the first to admit that NZ was hopelessly devoid of attractive women. Said they went to the UK to make $$ and get laid. If you're going to the UK to get laid, things are worse than they seem.

See you're living up to your "Zippy the Pinhead" avatar. That's the problem with prior generations, they're so smugly sure they've played it all right, they can't help but be a bunch of gloating douchebags.

One spring break I changed filters in all of the AC units in a high rise dorm. The housekeeping staff was watching TV in the stdent rooms, playing cards in the housekeeping closets and even sleeping on the beds! The janitor was mopping a floor in a tee-shaped building. He would start in the middle and mop to the exterior. He would then sit on a bucket and watch it dry, walk across and the mop the other two hallways in the same fashion.My buddy and I actually worked up until quitting time. The first day we arrive at 3:30 and there was a line of 80 or so waiting to punch our time cards. Each day of that week we quit a few minutes earlier than the day before. Always the same long line. I think they all quit working 15 to 20 minutes beforehand and waited in line.

My guess is that they could pay 15 to 20% more to the top third of their staff and fire the rest and do just fine at most state colleges.

And why does this happen? There is no 'profit motive' in this for the person 'supervising' them. They are just a worker bee as well (excep they get paid big bucks and a pension)......if the person at the top was looking after the bottom line then there would be procedures in place to get the most out of the workers.....trust me, I know, I am in private industry.

More expensive, yes, but well worth it! After all, students are paying for what they get--especially at Ivy League schools--everyone gets an "A" and professors who actually push and challenge students lose their tenure/job. The "completion agenda" is in full swing, and education is the last thing college is for in 2014. So lay that money down and skate through four years of minimal work and zero critical thinking. If you're lucky, the diploma "earned" will qualify you for a position in the corporate machine (probably on all fours). With all the debt a four-year degree incurs, this is a position one will assume for life.

financialize and tax mother's milk
and then sue the bitches, that is the
thing. indenture the newborns
for what they receive
before they are born to
sustain the riches
the few have adored and bestowed
upon themselves.
.
anyway poems *tm

It looks to me like the ratio of the elite schools to the average has also doubled, based on my example was about 2.5x in 1970 and is now over 4x.

OTOH at most schools that is only for *list* price, and if you come from a middle-class family you are generally granted a major discount, which might just take that multiple back down to 2.5x or even less.

But as everyone says, we've probably passed max university, major parts of it are going online whether you do them from your parents' basement or an elite school's dorm room.

In fact, I might want to start shopping for some online classes meself right about now ...

Cant wait till people actually have to pay for their healthcare! They might have to forgo meds, vaccines, surgery, prosthetic legs and go for the cheaper alternatives. We'll start to see disabled people again like in the good ole days!

85 year old woman who never made $200/week in her life is popping pills to the tune of $400/week, for what? Because big pharma has her and her doc convinced it will make her live a little longer? This all unsustainable. But it keeps going because "Medicare" is paying.

Augusta National's founder, Bobby Jones, might have been stunned at what his beloved Masters has become. He attended his last tournament in 1971, eight months before his death. That year Charles Coody, a drab but personable Texan, beat out Jack Nicklaus and Johnny Miller by two strokes. His winner's check of $25,000, adjusted for inflation, equates to $145,000 today, or one-tenth of this year's $1.4 million for the winner

A couple of years ago I saw all these people bailing from the private sector heading for university where they were actually getting pay raises. Now, these people were decent folks...but they were NOT what I considered to be university teaching material. But the universities were hiring anyone with a pulse at the time. And I wondered to myself when it would end...thinking it couldn't last long especially with the private sector struggling to absorb all those debt-laden college kids.

Now here I am reading more about the bubble STILL wondering how long it can go on. Even the housing bubble lasted years longer than many critics thought it should. Perhaps we have another few years of this too?

OK.. being a college student.. I think we all know that there is a major problem with student debt. In my eyes this topic is close to being beaten to death. But what is to come of it???????? I've still yet to figure that out.

The average is like $20k, which is not too bad assuming they are able to get a decent job. It is a millstone around the neck for others. Take someone with $40k in debt and no hope of making more than $12/hr. They will suffer under the weight. Some will struggle for decades, others will go nuts and become societal outcasts.

There have always been some government programs to relieve the debt, such as becoming a teacher or doctor on a reservation or something. Maybe those will be expanded somewhat.

I had $10k of debt from 1988, which I paid off by the time my oldest was 13 (12 years after I graduated). I would have paid it off earlier, but it was a real weird situation trying to communicate with the loan company. Basically they did not want it paid off sooner since interest rates were dropping throughout those years.

I upvoted you because of the statement about law programs. There are no law jobs, unless you know someone, and hanging out your shingle right after graduating is a fast-track to homelessness. I know recent law graduates who took teaching jobs in secondary schools, because the prospects of being able to make rent were far better.

When it comes to healthcare many people see governments intrusion into the market results in higher cost, the same can be said in education. Government loans are a driving force behind tuition inflation. Low interest and easy to get loans are not the anaswer.

We would be better off letting student loan interest rates rise and searching for other ways to drive down the cost of higher education with innovations like integration of more online classes and addressing the inflated price of books required for educational courses. More on this subject in the article below.

Student loans and low interest rate auto loans have helped push this economy forward. The nice thing is they don't even add to the government deficit. Students use this money to live on and not just for school fees and sadly a lot of the auto loans are sub-prime. the article below delves into the atuo sales.

I've been going to higher education for years. Finally got accepted into Janet Napolitano's (Big Sis) UC system for this Fall. Does this mean I have a Rothschild bubble between my ears?

She supposedly left the DHS because she refused Obama's request to set off the stolen nukes from Dyess Air Force Base in a Globalist EMP attack against the United States of America. It is my belief that she's hunkered down in the UC system because she knows that when the DHS attacks America the UC System will be off limits to them. Anyhow that's why I'm going there. Oh and the Rothschilds are paying for it. Although I'm not sure that they know that yet.

One thing that's not mentioned but is relevant: the periods of highest inflation in tuition costs also correlate with periods of state budget austerity due to lower revenues during economic downturns. The states pay less to the universities, who pass the difference in state funding on to the parents in the form of tuition hikes. A better analysis would include an inflation-adjusted accounting of all institutional funding (state funding, national grants, university hospital revenue and tuition) as a per-capita figure.

When states fund the colleges more, the cost is socialized to all citizens; when it's passed on as tuition, it becomes more of an individual risk rather than public risk. The flip side is that loans are (or at least were) often private, so a middleman was taking a profit off that as well.

Another big and understudied factor is university hospital revenue, tied to inflation costs in healthcare: every university that can afford it is buying a hospital, and some are trying to start their own health insurance plans. Both are major profit centers, and the accounting is largely opaque, not that you'll get an honest budget statement out of any university anyway.

There's going to be some justifiable expansion in costs to fund education in new technologies: nanoscale, aerospace, and other cutting-edge research doesn't come cheap. But there's a lot of waste that needs to go, and there's a lot of pension plans that were never funded properly. Interestingly, full-time professorial salaries have risen about par with inflation, although that doesn't take into account the disembowlment of full-time jobs in education -- there's a lot of amazingly low-wage, part-time work and grad student labor in colleges now, because, when full-time staff die or retire, it's cheaper to replace them with TA's or part-time labor at rock-bottom prices. Someone really needs to do an in-depth study of where the money actually goes. Good luck getting any fiscal transparency from the guys who teach accounting fraud, though.

Here's part of the reason tuition is out of control .. more and more non-academic departments and bureaucrats. Each department is organized into many sub-departments and every department is headed by a Vice-Chancellor making $300K a year. Here's a list from a local university:

Read this website for years now, learned much about economics, but the fear mongering and doomsday prepping is over the top. Most people who comment here are so heavily invested into some kind of financial Armageddon that you might as well create a new religion and wait for Jesus to drop out of the clouds, you're no different than any other wild cult... but I still love y'all ;)

Anyway, it's time to give back a bit, so many insiders post actual info here amongst the buy gold/silver/something else, I hate the FED, government sucks blah blah comments... I guess now is a good time for my first actual post.

So I'm a University Professor, in a top 5 medical school, tenured, NIH funded, running a lab, teaching medical/pharmacy/graduate students. You want the truth? Here's the truth.

Yes, the University system is somewhat warped atm. Many students come into undergraduate paying to be lectured about topics that have little chance of getting them a decent paying job in the real world... you know the ones. But as you self-professed libertarians preach endlessly, it's a free country. They want to learn it, they pay for it, and we cash their checks. Why is that any worse than anyone buying anything else? People can choose how they spend their money (or who they become indebted to).

Also, I suspect for a lot of parents having their children go to a college/university appeases any fears they have of the transition from being a dependent teenager to an independent adult. Colleges are mostly safe campuses (yes, shootings do happen, but the odds are still low given the ridiculously large number of campuses in our country), so having 4-5 years to grow up (hopefully) does serve some purpose.

Now, are there are too many administrators getting overpaid? Yes. Are there too many 65+ year old gray bearded professors making 200k a year who don't know how to create a decent powerpoint presentation that we can't get rid of because of bullshit baby boomer PC laws banning age discrimination? Hell yes. Are most academics democrats? You can bet your gold stashes on it. Is there anything we can do about this? No, not until the baby boomers finally move on and we can start undoing some of the ridiculous laws they created in the system. However, until students stop showing up every year en masse, there is no incentive for major schools to do this. Sure, the smaller, no-name fringe schools will go down. Who gives a flying fuck? But the big daddies like mine? No chance. As much as you all hate this, college sports keep the system afloat. They are one of the cornerstone fabrics that tie this country together, and that will always be the case. They've survived world wars, crashes, terrorist strikes, etc... nothing will change that. It's what makes America what it is, love it or hate it (I personally love it).

Is it right that the Fed is subsidizing this? Depends on how you look at it... sure, 11% of loans are in default, which means 89% are not. That's a helluva a lot of interest we are collecting! And I'd rather the government collect it and then redirect it, than a bank take it for a CEO bonus (and thanks to you all for educating me on how corrupt that system is!). And no, government does not ruin everything it touches (but a lot, yes)... I hope most of you realize that the majority of new drugs, treatments, and technologies are born out of basic discoveries made in Universities that would never be funded in the private sector due to excessive risk. NASA anyone?

On the idea that most college education will be online... really. How many of you will get operated on by an MD with an online education? Bullshit. When your life is on the line, just like PETA McCartney and all the other pious preachers of crap gospel, you will come crying like a little bitch and ask us to save your life. And we will. Because that's what we do. Using methods developed in a University hospital. You can't learn how to do basic science research, practice in a court of law, engineer a jet engine, etc online. Yes, crazy left wing crap is taught often at Universities, but that is only a small minority of the curriculum. If you guys keep focusing on the negative points to prove what you want to be true, you might as well rename your avatar to Michael Moore... seriously.

They want to learn it, they pay for it, and we cash their checks. Why is that any worse than anyone buying anything else? People can choose how they spend their money (or who they become indebted to).

It's a free market but it's a very distorted market. They're free to choose to pay for it, but it's way more expensive than it should be thanks to decades of government subsidies. It shouldn't be like that. Kids aren't going to say "no" to a college degree if they can get it, because for many many professions the piece of paper is needed. So, they make questionable decisions and go into mountains of debt to get the diploma, and only learn what a mistake it was a few years down the road. It's a mess and it's getting worse and worse.

No one here is against higher education in general, and most of us approve of STEM-type majors. Most of the other stuff however is way overpriced and/or useless in real life.

For what it's worth, 11% default rates are pretty shitty generally speaking for a loan product, and I'm sure there are many many other ex-students who are making the payments but the debt is a big burden. All of this so lenders can earn interest on debt that can never be discharged and assorted college staff can make six figure salaries.

It has been a while since it was time to pay attention to the rising student loan problem. When I say a while I am referring to around 5 years at least, as after the housing it is the biggest issue in the US. For some reason our government chose to ignore it and we are only left to wait until more people will get into the debt which they obviously won’t be able to pay off. Unless, of course, one day children refuse to send their college admission application writings and say that they don’t feel like obtaining an average of $-25000-$35000 debt per a person. So I don’t even want to think about what future is holding for us